Health inequalities are on the rise in the United States: the gap in life expectancy between those at the top and the bottom of the income spectrum has increased rapidly since the dawn of the century, to the point where the lives of the poor are cut short by up to a decade and a half compared with those of the wealthy. Moreover, while the rich tend to live longer everywhere, life expectancy among the poor varies significantly by geographical region.

In our article recently published in the IJE, we show that these patterns of health are the product of powerful political and economic forces. Over the past few decades, neoliberal politics, the decline of unions and economic globalisation have resulted in rapid industrial restructuring and economic dislocation in the US. Organised labour has been eroded in the industrial heartland, and manufacturing operations have been shifted to the non-unionised south and to foreign countries.

Traditionally, asthma and type 1 diabetes have been considered distinct immune-mediated diseases in which the underlying immune responses counteract each other, resulting in an inverse association between the diseases. In our study, recently published in the IJE, we explored the association between asthma and type 1 diabetes in childhood in a novel way, and observed that the direction of the association is dependent on the order of appearance of the diseases.